The Deepest South: The United States, Brazil, and the African Slave Trade

Toward the Empire of Brazil

Toward the Empire of Brazil Brazil, which borders every nation in South America except Chile and Ecuador, has only a tiny portion of its territory, in the far south, in the temperate zone. Its shoreline stretches for 4600 miles, and it is as near to Africa as to the United States—a connection which inevitably attracted nationals of the latter who were interested in perpetuating the slave trade.1 This chapter will explore early connections between the U.S. (and the thirteen colonies) in the context of the slave trade to Brazil and before its post-1840 expansion. The slavery tie between the nation that was to become the U.S. and Brazil stretches back at least to the early 17th century, when the Dutch controlled New Netherlands—i.e., “New York”—and a Brazilian colony and were transporting enslaved Africans from there to North America .2 Even after the Dutch were ousted from control of Brazil and Portugal extended its domination, this collaboration on the slave trade between North and South America continued. In the early 18th century, Thomas Amory of Charleston, who traded regularly in West Africa, “pointed to the ease with which he could send slaves to Brazil” for “Negroes sell as well at [South] Carolina as at Brazil.”3 Still, Northeastern merchants dominated the slave trade to Brazil.4 The family of Mary Robinson Hunter, whose spouse served as a diplomat in Rio de Janeiro beginning in the 1830s, was preeminent in this commerce.5 The early relationship between the North American colonists and Brazil was facilitated by the relationship between Britain and Portugal. The alliance between London and Lisbon was long-standing—a trend that was evident at the surrender at Yorktown, where the man who presented Cornwallis’s sword was Charles O’Hara, the “bastard son of Lord Tyrawley, English Ambassador to Portugal” and “his mistress, Anna, a Portuguese lady.” This was reflective of the fact that “many English, because of old social ties and economic trading positions, did 1 17 business with and lived in both Brazil and Portugal.”6 This LondonLisbon alliance, in turn, facilitated ties between North America and Brazil.7 The relationship did not cease after the Revolution, as U.S. businessmen were prominent in the slave trade to Montevideo in the late 18th century.8 The young republic’s continuing interest in South America was palpable .9 Early on Thomas Jefferson instructed John Jay about the prospects for the ousting of Portugal from Brazil; his opinion that “the slaves will take the side of their masters”10 seemed like self-interested wishful thinking on his part. Anticipating his fellow Virginian, Matthew Fontaine Maury, Jefferson also asserted that “ ‘it is impossible not to look forward to distant times . . . [when the U.S. would] cover the whole northern, if not the southern continent.’ ”11 According to legal historian, A. Leon Higginbotham, there is “much reason to believe that [Thomas] Jefferson was not truly troubled about the international slave trade,”12 which suggests that this Founding Father similarly anticipated the most aggressive “fire-eaters” of the 1850s who too envisioned an empire for slavery that encompassed the Americas. Like revolutionaries past and present, those in North America were not averse to spreading their influence beyond their borders, a trend eased when Brazilian intellectuals “secretly sought out Jefferson in France for confidential advice,” just as “overseas [Brazilian] students at the University of Coimbra devoured accounts of the American revolution and of its constitutional innovations.” The “martyr of Brazil’s aborted revolution of 1789” in Minas Gerais “kept in his pocket a copy of the French translations of the American state constitutions, though knowing no French he had to ask others to translate it for him.”13 Jefferson , the founder who may have paid more attention to his South American neighbor than his counterparts, remarked in his later days that he would “‘rejoice to see the fleets of Brazil and the United States riding together as between of the same family and having the same interest.’”14 It is unclear if Jefferson, a slaveholder, had this peculiar institution in mind when he envisioned such an alliance between Brazil and the U.S. since this was the overriding characteristic held in common between these two vast nations.15 The split in U.S. ranks on the question of the African Slave Trade may have assisted the proliferation of these U.S. dealers in the South American market. Though over the decades the...